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Each social level is convinced that its pattern is the best of all patterns; but each level rationalizes its behavior in its own way.

The upper level rationalizes on the basis of what is right or wrong. For this group, all socio-sexual behavior becomes a moral issue. Morality and sexual morality become more or less synonymous terms. Many persons at this level believe that there are few types of immorality which are more enormous than sexual immorality. Proper, straight, upright, honorable, clean, fine, wholesome, manly, and pure refer primarily to abstinence from socio-sexual relations. Their opposites refer to participation in non-marital sexual relations. Honor, fidelity, and success in marriage are understood to involve the complete absorption of the individual’s sexual urge in coitus with his wife. There is nothing of which persons at this level are more afraid than a charge of immorality, as immorality is defined by the group. There is no disgrace that is more feared than that which may result from sexual scandal. Sex is so clearly a moral issue that many persons in the group consider it a religious obligation to impose their code upon all other segments of the population.

Lower social levels, on the contrary, rationalize their patterns of sexual behavior on the basis of what is natural or unnatural. Pre-marital intercourse is natural, and it is, in consequence, acceptable. Masturbation is not natural, nor is petting as a substitute for intercourse, nor even petting as a preliminary to intercourse.

There are some individuals at lower levels who do see moral issues in sexual behavior, but by and large even they recognize that nature will triumph over morals. They may “know that intercourse is wrong,” but “they expect to have it anyway, because it is human and natural to have it.” It is not at all unusual to find middle class persons who have had intercourse with scores or even hundreds of girls, still insisting that they would never marry a girl who was not a virgin (Table 92). If the upper level male departs from his code and has intercourse, he is most likely to have it with the fiancée. His excuse is that “it is not wrong when love is involved.” The middle class or lower level male, on the contrary, may frankly state that “I didn’t think anything of her, so we had intercourse. But when I find the girl that I really love, I won’t touch her until I marry her.” To many persons in the upper level, and to some in the middle class, the moral issues are matters of divine revelation and mandate. As a fundamentalist professor of philosophy put it, “There are some things that one innately understands to be right or wrong, and about which there is no need for logical discussion.”

Table 92. Attitudes on pre-marital intercourse, at three educational levels
Restraints
on
Intercourse		 Educ.
Level		 All Ages Adol.-25 26-45 46+
Cases % Cases % Cases % Cases %
Moral objections 0-8 814 20.8 317 18.9 338 16.2 159 33.9
9-12 650 25.5 369 22.8 232 28.5   
13 + 3161 61.4 2016 62.5 969 56.6 176 76.2
Fear of public
opinion

0-8 775 13.5 300 14.4 322 11.5 153 16.3
9-12 615 14.3 343 12.0 224 17.0   
13 + 2847 22.8 1756 21.5 918 24.1 173 28.9
Fear of pregnancy 0-8 814 20.4 318 19.2 336 20.6 160 22.5
9-12 645 17.5 364 18.6 232 15.5   
13 + 3136 27.6 1995 28.0 964 27.5 177 23.7
Fear of venereal
disease		 0-8 811 28.6 317 27.1 335 29.0 159 30.8
9-12 641 25.3 361 23.8 231 26.8   
13 + 3143 24.8 2001 25.1 965 23.9 177 25.4
Lack opportunity 0-8 785 34.6 312 36.9 323 33.8 150 32.0
9-12 627 38.0 358 37.5 225 39.6   
13 + 3104 51.6 1980 51.4 950 55.5 174 33.4
Lack of interest in
having more		 0-8 327 41.9 155 35.5 117 45.3 55 52.7
9-12 279 44.5 153 45.1 111 45.9   
13+ 1831 18.8 1041 18.7 688 19.2 102 17.6
Male desires to
marry a virgin		 0-8 595 43.3 215 40.9 267 38.5 113 59.3
9-12 523 39.2 309 40.8 176 32.4   
13 + 2972 46.5 1943 50.7 880 36.2 149 41.6

“Educ. level 0-8” are the males who never go beyond grade school.
“Educ. level 9-12” are the males who enter high school but never go beyond.
“Educ. level 13+” are the males who will ultimately go to college.

For both upper and lower levels, these matters do lie deeper than logic. There are, in consequence, no rational arguments, no cool discussions, no initial presentations of data, no investigations after the fact when diverse sexual patterns come into conflict. Like matters of religion, the mores are simply accepted and defended. For many persons, the mores are even more implicit than religious tenets. The arguments that are produced in their defense are the veriest sorts of rationalizations. If they cannot be defended in any other way, they are accepted as products of the experience of the past which has culminated in the wisdom of the present custom.

Most of the tragedies that develop out of sexual activities are products of this conflict between the attitudes of different social levels. Sexual activities in themselves rarely do physical damage, but disagreements over the significance of sexual behavior may result in personality conflicts, a loss of social standing, imprisonment, disgrace, and the loss of life itself.

In Clinical Practice. Wherever professionally trained persons try to direct the behavior of lower level individuals, conflicts are likely to arise because of these diverse sexual philosophies. Clinicians of all groups, including physicians, clinical psychologists, school psychologists, nurses, psychiatrists — particularly if they work in public clinics — have a portion and sometimes a major portion of their contacts with lower social levels. The sexual advice which the upper level clinician gives will mean most when it takes into account the background of the community from which the client comes. The upper level physician or nurse who expects the lower level patient to disrobe for physical examination should understand that he outrages the mores of the group in which the patient has been raised. The physician who mixes moral advice with his medical prescription should realize that the applicability of his advice will vary with the social level from which the patient comes. The woman physician in a prison may never become reconciled to the fact that every one of the inmates in the institution proves to have had coital experience before reaching the institution; but she must comprehend that her effectiveness as a physician is impaired when she proffers moral advice which has no relation to the realities of the world from which the inmate comes.

Marriage counseling, as set up today, is based upon concepts of marriage, goals, and ideals which may appear right to the educational level from which the marriage counselors come, and from which most of the counselor’s clients also come, but which mean something else in the communities from which a lower level client may come. The sexual techniques which marriage councils and marriage manuals recommend are designed to foster the sort of intellectual eroticism which the upper level esteems. It depends on prolonged pre-coital play, a considerable variety in techniques, a maximum of stimulation before coital union, some delay after effecting such union, and, finally, orgasm which is simultaneous for the male and the female. Most of this, however, would be anathema to a large portion of the population, and an outrage to their mores. Many marriage counselors would like to impose their own upper level patterns on their clients, without regard to the complications which may develop when an individual is educated into something that puts him at discord with the mores of the society in which he was raised and in which he may still be living.

In industry, some of the conflicts which arise between the better educated management and the more poorly educated labor may depend on failures to comprehend the diverse sexual patterns which are involved. Trained persons are increasingly used for personnel staffs in industrial plants. These persons, however, are not always aware of the viewpoints of lower level groups. Personnel managers, social workers, psychologists, physicians who try to comprehend and accept the patterns by which these other levels live, might aid in establishing a better rapport between labor and management.

In Social Service. Wherever people of different social levels come into contact, conflicts between sexual patterns, and failures to understand the patterns of other groups and the philosophies that lie back of them, provide considerable impediments to any cooperation between the groups. Administrators of institutions need to understand the patterns of the communities from which their inmate populations come. This is especially true in penal institutions, in homes for the feeble-minded, in children’s homes, in homes for the aged, in hospitals, and in other institutions whose populations come mostly from lower social levels. Heads of boarding schools and of colleges are not so often concerned with this problem, because their populations come largely from their own social level; but teachers in public grade schools and in public high schools are regularly confronted with the problem of understanding cultures other than their own. The unmarried college graduate who is an eighth grade teacher will find it difficult to understand how her eighth grade boy, from the laborer’s or mechanic’s home, could be so evil as to have had intercourse with one of her fourteen-year old girls. Her reaction, based upon her upper level standards, may result in the boy’s expulsion from school, and in public disgrace for both the boy and the girl. The teacher does not realize that more than a fourth (28%) of all her other eighth grade boys have similarly had intercourse (Table 136). The boy who was caught might have been handled differently if the teacher had known more about the boy’s background.

Social workers are involved with sexual problems even more often than physicians. There are cases of pre-marital pregnancies, of rape, of divorce resulting from sexual conflicts between the parents of the children in whom the social worker is interested. There may be coitus, and sometimes incestuous relations, between the children and the adults in the community. These last are things that may offend the community as well as the social worker. But everywhere the social worker runs into a record of sexual contacts among children, pre-marital intercourse, and extra-marital intercourse; and although the community accepts these things as inevitable, the social worker sees the behavior in terms of her own mores, and may be outraged and vindictive in her reactions. She may refuse welfare allowances to a family in which there is such “delinquency.” In many cases, it is the welfare worker who brings the case of sexual activity to the attention of the court. Often it is she who initiates the moves to have such “neglected” children taken away from their parents and made wards of the court, for placement in other families or in children’s homes or in juvenile disciplinary institutions. The untrained, less educated individual who enters social work, particularly in smaller communities, sometimes has a better understanding of the realities of these lower level groups. Some of the graduates of some of the better schools for social workers may also have some comprehension of these differences between levels. The least comprehending are the well intentioned, upper level women who turn to social work as a contribution to civic welfare. Some of the most poorly understood groups are in lower level Negro communities, and it takes a social worker who is capable of comprehending a great deal more than her own social level to work effectively with such a group. It is sometimes suggested that Negro communities should be handled only by Negro social workers; but educated, upper level Negroes may have as little comprehension of a lower level Negro community’s attitudes as upper level white persons would have. In fact, the upper level Negro worker may be even more intent upon “raising” the pattern of the lower level community, in a move designed to bring credit to Negroes as a race.

In the Army and Navy. Officers in the Army and Navy are faced with the problem of dealing with persons of diverse social levels who are brought together into a single, closely knit community. Since most of the population has not gone beyond the tenth grade in school, most of the men in the armed forces have lower level patterns of sexual behavior. Some of the officers come out of the ranks and comprehend these patterns. Professionally trained officers who are products of West Point or Annapolis, or of some other special school, are more likely to come from better educated levels. Some of the incongruities which exist between Army and Navy rules and the administration of those rules are products of these differences in the backgrounds of officers and enlisted men. American armies of occupation have found themselves in cultures that are different from our own in their attitudes on matters of sex. The upper level officer who establishes the law for the country he is temporarily ruling may try to impose “moral standards” which reflect the mores of only a limited portion of our American population, upon the whole of a foreign people who have none of the sexual patterns of any of our social levels.

During times of peace, the better educated segments of the population are sufficiently isolated to be unaware of the sexual patterns in the mass of the population. In times of war, when these upper level groups are suddenly thrust into close contact with these other levels, they are startled to discover the realities of human behavior. They are inclined to blame all of the sexual activity which enlisted men have upon the organization of the Army and Navy itself. The specific data which we have indicate that very few of the men in the armed forces are as active sexually as they would have been at home in times of peace, but the upper level, especially the older generation of the upper level, is unaware of this. Considerable pressure, in consequence, is brought upon military officials to establish and enforce rules, and upon Congress to enact laws which are designed to force all of the heterogeneous group which constitutes a draft army into an upper level pattern of sexual behavior. The demand is fortified by an emphasis upon the dangers of venereal disease; but it is certain that many of the persons who discuss disease are more concerned over the morals of the men for whom the government has suddenly become responsible. Such an issue could be grasped more intelligently if more people understood the origins of the sexual patterns of the men in uniform.
 

Table 85. Total pre-marital and extra-marital intercourse, as related to educational level
Age
Group		 Educ.
Level		 Cases Total Non-marital Intercourse, by Educational Levels
Total population Active Population Accum.
Incid.
%
Mean
Frequency		 Median
Freq.		 % of
Total
Outlet		 Incid.
%		 Mean
Freq.		 Median
Freq.
Single Males: Pre-marital Intercourse
Adol.-15 0-8 630 1.08 ± 0.10 0.00 37.94 48.1 2.24 1.21 48
9-12 511 0.81 ± 0.10 0.00 25.45 43.2 1.88 0.84 43
13 + 2421 0.08 ± 0.01 0.00 3.73 9.8 0.83 0.29 10
16-20 0-8 635 1.74 ± 0.11 0.73 58.92 85.4 2.04 0.99 86
9-12 515 1.43 ± 0.12 0.44 42.17 75.5 1.89 0.89 76
13 + 2475 0.25 + 0.02 0.00 11.26 41.8 0.60 0.17 44
21-25 0-8 312 2.00 ± 0.19 0.82 68.23 86.2 2.32 1.06 90
9-12 217 1.25 ± 0.19 0.38 42.72 74.2 1.69 0.77 84
13 + 1593 0.44 ± 0.03 0.02 19.41 53.9 0.81 0.30 64
26-30 0-8 137 1.82 ± 0.24 0.88 57.60 87.6 2.07 1.16 94
9-12 95 1.18 ± 0.22 0.41 38.72 71.6 1.64 0.86 85
13 + 373 0.64 ± 0.08 0.05 21.40 56.3 1.14 0.48 68
Married Males: Extra-marital Intercourse
16-20 0-8 139 0.52 ± 0.11 0.00 11.37 44.6 1.16 0.44  
9-12 87 0.54 ± 0.16 0.00 10.91 37.9 1.44 0.23
13 + 46 0.12 ± 0.07 0.00 2.91 19.6 0.61 0.10
21-25 0-8 284 0.53 ± 0.13 0.00 12.89 34.5 1.53 0.36
9-12 144 0.48 ± 0.11 0.00 11.21 43.1 1.11 0.30
13 + 323 0.05 ± 0.02 0.00 1.57 14.2 0.38 0.11
26-30 0-8 244 0.26 ± 0.05 0.00 7.66 35.7 0.72 0.25
9-12 113 0.36 ± 0.11 0.00 9.75 46.9 0.77 0.19
13 + 380 0.07 ± 0.02 0.00 2.43 19.5 0.37 0.08
31-35 0-8 186 0.18 ± 0.04 0.00 6.97 31.7 0.56 0.26
9-12 82 0.19 ± 0.06 0.00 5.61 36.6 0.51 0.21
13 + 301 0.16 ± 0.04 0.00 5.92 24.6 0.63 0.25
36-40 0-8 143 0.18 ± 0.05 0.00 8.17 26.6 0.68 0.35
9-12 58 0.09 ± 0.03 0.00 3.45 32.8 0.27 0.19
13 + 189 0.26 ± 0.11 0.00 10.38 29.6 0.89 0.21
41-45 0-8 100 0.12 ± 0.03 0.00 6.30 21.0 0.57 0.44
13+ 138 0.12 ± 0.03 0.00 6.39 23.9 0.52 0.21
46-50 0-8 70 0.11 ± 0.04 0.00 6.05 18.6 0.59 0.42
13+ 81 0.25 ± 0.08 0.00 14.09 27.2 0.93 0.58

Including the non-marital intercourse with companions and with prostitutes.

Figure 101. Total pre-marital intercourse, by educational level and occupational class

“Educ. level 0-8” are the males who never go beyond grade school.
“Educ. level 9-12” are the males who enter high school but never go beyond.
“Educ. level 13+” are the males who will ultimately go to college.

Occupational Class:
0. Dependents 1. Underworld
2. Day labor 3. Semi-skilled labor 4. Skilled labor
5. Lower white collar group 6. Upper white collar group 7. Professional group
8. Business executive group 9. Extremely wealthy group

For single males of the age group 16-20.
Relative lengths of bars compare mean frequencies for the groups.
Note similarity of data based on educational levels and data based on occupational classes.


In Everyday Contacts. In general, the upper level feels that “lower level morality” lacks the ideals and the righteousness of the upper level philosophy. The lower level, on the other hand, feels that educated and upper level society has an artificial and insincere pattern of sexual behavior which is all the more obnoxious because the upper level tries to force its pattern upon all other levels. Legends about the immorality of the lower level are matched by legends about the perversions of the upper level. One is inclined to accept the particular legends that apply to the group to which one does not belong. Such legends reach their maximum proportions when they concern whole racial or national groups: “The French do this, the Chinese do that.” Primitive peoples and pagans are always believed to be aberrant in their sexual lives. There are exaggerated legends concerning the Negro’s sexual behavior, and Negro leaders are much disturbed over such popular beliefs (Cobb 1947). Sexual propaganda against the Jews as a race was a cornerstone of the Hitlerian attack on that group in Germany. Both Nazi and Japanese propaganda included attacks on the sexual behavior of Americans at home. There are traditions concerning the sexual behavior of the Italian, Spanish, Latin American, and other groups, even though there are no objective data to establish any generalizations. There are, of course, endless variations in sexual patterns in each of these populations, just as there are in our own American population. What data we have so far on these other groups indicate that there is at least some stratification of social levels in all of them; and this would lead one to presuppose that each group would, therefore, have a variety of sexual patterns.

In the Law. Anglo-American sex laws are a codification of the sexual mores of the better educated portion of the population. While they are rooted in the English common law, their maintenance and defense lie chiefly in the hands of state legislators and judges who, for the most part, come from better-educated levels.

Consequent on this fact, the written codes severely penalize all non-marital intercourse, whether it occurs before or after marriage; but they do not make masturbation a crime, even though there are a few courts which have tried to read such interpretations into the law.

However, the enforcement of the law is placed in the hands of police officials who come largely from grade school and high school segments of the population. For that reason, the laws against non-marital intercourse are rarely and only capriciously enforced, and then most often when upper level individuals demand such police action. It is difficult for a lower level policeman or detective to feel that much of a crime is being committed when he finds a boy and a girl involved in the sort of sexual activity which was part of his own adolescent history, and which he knows was in the histories of most of the youth in the community in which he was raised. If the behavior involves persons against whom the policeman has a grudge (probably for some totally non-sexual reason), if the relation involves too public an exhibition, if it involves a contact between a much older and a younger person (which under the policeman’s code is more or less taboo), if it involves a relation between persons belonging to different racial groups (which under his code may be exceedingly taboo), then the laws against pre-marital intercourse become convenient tools for punishing these other activities. But if it is the routine sort of relationship that the officer very well knows occurs regularly in the lower level community, then he may pay little attention to the enforcement of the laws. The policeman’s behavior may appear incongruous or hypocritical to the citizen from the other side of the town, but it is based on a comprehension of realities of which the other citizen is not often aware. There are policemen who frankly state that they consider it one of their functions to keep the judge from knowing things that he simply does not understand.

On the other hand, if it is the case of a boy who is found masturbating in a back alley, the policeman is likely to push the case through court and see that the boy is sent to an institution for indecent exposure, for moral degeneracy, or for perversion. When the boy arrives in the reformatory, the small-town sheriff may send a letter urging that the administration of the institution pay especial attention to curing the boy of the perversion. However, the educated superintendent of the institution is not much impressed by the problem, and he may explain to the boy that masturbation does him no harm, even though the law penalizes him for his public exposure. The superintendent may let it be known among his officers that masturbation seems to him to be a more acceptable form of sexual outlet than the homosexual activity which involves some of the inmates of the institution, and he may even believe that he has actually provided for the sexual needs of his wards by making such a ruling. On the other hand, the guards in the institution, who are the officials most often in contact with the inmates, have lower level backgrounds and lower level attitudes toward masturbation. In consequence, they continue to punish inmates who are discovered masturbating as severely as they would punish them for homosexual activity.

On sex cases, the decisions of the judge on the bench are often affected by the mores of the group from which he originated. Judges often come from better educated groups, and their severe condemnation of sex offenders is largely a defense of the code of their own social level. Lower level individuals simply do not understand the bitter denunciations which many a judge heaps upon the lower level boy or girl who has been involved in sexual relations. They cannot see why behavior which, to them, seems perfectly natural and humanly inevitable should be punishable under the law. For them, there is no majesty in laws which are as unrealistic as the sex laws. Life is a maze. The sex laws and the upper level persons who defend them are simply hazards about which one has to learn to find his way. Like the rough spots in a sidewalk, or the traffic on a street, the sex laws are things that one learns to negotiate without getting into too much trouble; but that is no reason why one should not walk on sidewalks, or cross streets, or have sexual relations.

The influence of the mores is strikingly shown by a study of the decisions which are reached by judges with different social backgrounds. There is still a portion of the legal profession that has not gone to college and, particularly where judges are elected by popular vote, there are some instances of judges who have originated in lower social levels and acquired their legal training by office apprenticeship or night school courses. The significance of the background becomes most apparent when two judges, one of upper level and one of lower level, sit in alternation on the same bench. The record of the upper level judge may involve convictions and maximum sentences in a high proportion of the sex cases, particularly those that involve non-marital intercourse or prostitution. The judge with the lower level background may convict in only a small fraction of the cases. The lower level community recognizes these differences between judges, and expresses the hope that when it is brought to trial it will come before the second judge, because “he understands.” The experienced attorney similarly sees to it that his case is set for trial when the understanding judge is on the bench. Parole officers and social workers who investigate cases before they are decided in court may have a good deal to do with setting a particular case before a particular judge, in order to get a verdict that accords with the philosophy of their (the parole officers’) background.

Judges who are ignorant of the way in which the other three-quarters of the population lives, naively believe that the police officials are apprehending all of those who are involved in any material infraction of the sex laws. If the community has been aroused by a sex case which has involved a forceful rape or a death following a sexual relation, the judge may lead the other public officials in demanding the arrest of all sex offenders in the community. Newspapers goad the police, and there is likely to be a wave of arrests and convictions which carry maximum sentences, until the wide scope of the problem becomes apparent to even the most unrealistic official. It will be recalled that 85 per cent of the total male population has pre-marital intercourse (Table 136), 59 per cent has some experience in mouth-genital contacts (Table 94), nearly 70 per cent has relations with prostitutes (Table 138), something between 30 and 45 per cent has extramarital intercourse (Table 85), 37 per cent has some homosexual experience (Table 139), 17 per cent of the farm boys have animal intercourse (Table 151). All of these, and still other types of sexual behavior, are illicit activities, each performance of which is punishable as a crime under the law. The persons involved in these activities, taken as a whole, constitute more than 95 per cent of the total male population. Only a relatively small proportion of the males who are sent to penal institutions for sex offenses have been involved in behavior which is materially different from the behavior of most of the males in the population. But it is the total 95 per cent of the male population for which the judge, or board of public safety, or church, or civic group demands apprehension, arrest, and conviction, when they call for a clean-up of the sex offenders in a community. It is, in fine, a proposal that 5 per cent of the population should support the other 95 per cent in penal institutions. The only possible defense of the proposal is the fact that the judge, the civic leader, and most of the others who make such suggestions, come from that segment of the population which is most restrained on nearly all types of sexual behavior, and they simply do not understand how the rest of the population actually lives.

The penalties visited upon persons who are convicted of sex offense may be peculiarly severe, just because the judge does not comprehend the lower level background of the offender. The judge may give a long sentence because he believes that such a stay in prison will reform the ways of the particular individual who is being punished; but again he fails to understand the deep origins of sexual behavior. Data which we have on more than 1200 persons who have been convicted of sex offenses indicate that there are very few who modify their sexual patterns as a result of their contacts with the law, or, indeed, as a result of anything that happens to them after they have passed their middle teens. This is not because convicted sex offenders are peculiarly degenerate or different from the mass of the population. It is simply because all persons have their sexual patterns laid down for them by the custom of the communities in which they are raised.

The sex offender is a marked individual in the penal institution to which he is sent. He is lectured on the heinous nature of his crime by the prison official who receives him, even though in many cases he has not been involved in sex behavior which is fundamentally different from that of the institutional official himself. There is a mystery connected with the nature of the specific sexual activity for which a sex offender is convicted, and this brings emotional reactions from all persons concerned.

When it comes to a question of releasing sex offenders, parole boards are loath to take action. The inmate is judged by the standards of the upper level community from which most parole board members come. Women on prison boards are especially likely to come from a social level where the loss of virginity before marriage is an unforgivable moral offense. The girl whose future they are deciding comes from a community where three-fourths of the girls have intercourse before marriage. Persons who attempt to control the behavior of other persons might more properly be concerned with determining the extent of the departure of the individual from the behavior of the community of which he is a part.

Conflicts between social levels are as intense as the conflicts between nations, between cultures, between races, and between the most extreme of the religious groups. The existence of the conflict between sexual patterns is, however, not recognized by the parties immediately concerned, because neither of them understands the diversity of patterns which exist at different social levels. Each thinks that he is in a conflict with a particular individual. He is, however, more often in conflict with a whole culture.

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